Time	Speaker
9:00	Michele Margolis ABD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology “Disentangling the Relationship between Religion and Politics: How Partisanship Affects Religious Beliefs.” Michele Margolis is a PhD candidate focusing on American politics. Her main research interests are in voting behavior, public opinion, and political communication, particularly as they relate to religion and religiosity. Michele's dissertation examines the ways in which political attitudes and experiences influence religious identification and behavior. Other projects look at public opinion on health care, the role of knowledge in shaping attitudes, and methods for improving responses in survey experiments. She holds a BA in Political Science and Social Welfare from the University of California, Berkeley and an MSc in Political Communication from the London School of Economics.
9:45	Adriana Crespo-Tenorio ABD, Washington University, St. Louis “Bayesian Analysis of Change Points: A Bivariate Approach.” (with Jeff Gill) Adriana is a fourth-year PhD candidate in Political Science at Washington University in St Louis. Her research focuses on political methodology and international political economy. In her dissertation, she explores the relationship between oil prices, international cooperation, and domestic politics, using Bayesian statistical tools such as change point models and Bayesian meta-analysis. Adriana's additional research interests include financial crises, central bank independence, and text analysis.
10:30	Break
10:45	Doug Rice ABD, Pennsylvania State University “Measuring the Issue Content of Supreme Court Opinions through Probabilistic Topic Models.” Doug is a doctoral student in the Department of Political Science at Penn State University and, during the 2011-2012 academic year, a pre-doctoral fellow in Penn State's Quantitative Social Science Initiative (QuaSSI). Broadly, he is interested in the study of judicial politics, agenda-setting, public policy and political methodology. In his current research, he is developing measures for the agenda of federal courts of appeals and district courts and examining the cross-institutional agenda-setting role of the federal courts. As part of this and other research, he has focused on studying and utilizing methods for automated content analysis.
11:30	Brendan O'Connor ABD, Carnegie Mellon University (Machine Learning) “Statistical Learning of Frames from Text.” (with Noah Smith and David A. Bamman) Brendan is a Machine Learning Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)'s School of Computer Science, advised by Noah Smith. He is interested in statistical machine learning and natural language processing, especially when informed by or applied to the social sciences, such as economics and political science. He has been an intern in the Facebook Data Science group, and before grad school worked on crowdsourcing at CrowdFlower / Dolores Labs, and before that, semantic search at Powerset. His BS/MS is in Symbolic Systems from Stanford, concentrating in "Computation, Cognition, and Social Science.
12:15	Lunch
1:15	Molly Roberts ABD, Harvard University “How Robust Standard Errors Expose Problems They Do Not Fix.” (with Gary King) Molly Roberts is a third-year PhD student in Government at Harvard University. She received a B.A. in International Relations and Economics and M.S. in Statistics from Stanford University. Her research interests include the micro-foundations of collective action, the politics of censorship, and the politics of trade and foreign direct investment in China. Her methodological interests include automated content analysis in Chinese and English and ecological inference.
2:00	Brenton Kenkel ABD, University of Rochester “A General Solution to Nonignorable Missing Outcomes in Binary Choice Data.” Brenton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Rochester. His research uses formal modeling and statistical methods to develop and evaluate theories of international politics. His most recent papers examine the consequences of territorial conflict and the effectiveness of diplomatic communication between allies. Brenton has also worked on methodological projects on causal inference, flexible functional form modeling, and partial identification of model parameters.
2:45	Break
3:00	Adrienne Hosek ABD, University of California - Berkeley “Tax Preferences on the Income Roller Coaster.” Adrienne is PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on income inequality and redistributive politics in the United States, the statistics of causal inference, and survey experimentation. Her current empirical research is on the relationship between income volatility, or year to year changes in household income, and voter preferences for tax policy, specifically how short-term fluctuations in earnings affect individuals' support for tax reforms aimed at reducing income inequality, such as tax increases for the wealthy. She develops new survey methods for measuring preferences on complex policy issues and uses the results from her own survey experiments to help explain trends in public opinion relating to tax reforms and redistributive policies more broadly.
3:45	Molly Cohn ABD, Stanford University “Legislative Organization and the Second Face of Power: Evidence from U.S. State Legislatures.” (with Sarah F. Anzia) Molly is a fourth-year PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. Her dissertation examines how agenda setting procedures in the U.S. state legislatures affect majority party power. Molly's other research interests include statistical methods and political geography.